Romantic Survival: Disaster Beyond Repair in Lyrical Ballads

ABSTRACTThis article explores representations of disaster and survival in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. It starts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” a poem exemplary of the survival narrative, a poetic articulation of disaster fraught with fragmentation, repetition, and stagnation, in form and content. The article then reads the survival narrative in William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” arguing that, in Wordsworth’s poems, what has been affected by disaster can exist beyond repair. I focus on disastrous thinking, considering it another aspect of disaster that penetrates thought. Disastrous thinking appears in Wordsworth’s poems but also in our critical tradition, from New Criticism to more recent post-critical readings. It attempts to ameliorate catastrophe even when disaster has eliminated the historical and philosophical causes that make it comprehensible. The article finally re-turns to Coleridge’s poem to highlight the presence of active passivity, a mode of being that resists productivity and marketability while it emphasizes political thought over thoughtless action. Active passivity constitutes a form of arresting resistance that bears the potential for radical world change through the practice of patience, another name for constant laboring without quantifiable results. Notes1 Marie-Hélène Huet employs this term to remind us that before disaster was used as a noun to indicate a catastrophic event, it was employed to signify one’s experience of disaster, the feeling of being “uprooted” from one’s place “in the cosmos and cast adrift” (19). Disaster in this context is synonymous to worldlessness, the experience of being forced to leave your world without being able to inhabit a new one.2 The term “political” in this context does not carry the meaning it has in liberal democracies, where it is associated with “citizenship, elections, the particular forms of political representation and the various ideological families” (Stavrakakis 71). It rather refers to ways of being-in-the-world as a member of the polis, of an organized community.Even though this article does not claim that either resistance to repair or active passivity, a mode of existing beyond repair, make their first appearance in Romantic poetry, it argues that the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 provide, probably for the first time, a clear articulation of these modes of being.3 In his essay “Technomagism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image,” Orrin N. C. Wang employs Rancière’s notion of symbolic montage to read the poem’s shattered narrative. Wang focuses on the 1817 version of the poem that includes the addition of the gloss. He indicates that the meaning in Mariner comes through the parataxis of “disparate semes” that “are juxtaposed together” but through their sequence on the page, they create meaning (296). “Technomagism” is the name that Wang gives to this process that makes something out of “nothing at all” (292). The gloss, Wang asserts, which repeats and underscores the poem’s discontinuity, is a medium through which we come face to face with the “nonhuman, inhuman, nonhome” of the world around us (267).4 Robert Southey first critiqued the poem’s plot as “absurd or unintelligible” in his review of the Ballads in October 1798 (53).5 This reading opposes that of several scholars who also enunciate the poem’s erratic elements but nevertheless argue that the albatross is pivotal for the development of the story. Raimonda Modiano, for example, asserts that while the Mariner’s experience is “formless, incomprehensible, and unbearable,” language helps him create a “structured narrative with a beginning, climax, ending-and a moral lesson as well” (43). The killing of the albatross is important for Modiano since this is the moment that the Mariner loses his ability to speak (43). More recently, Thomas Pfau maintains that while the appearance of the dash in the structure of the stanza “forecloses any causal explanation,” it is the killing of the albatross that signifies the poem’s preoccupation with an experimental modernity that can lead, in Pfau’s interpretation of Coleridge’s poem, in an “unhinged, radically contingent cosmos” (“The Philosophy” 987). For Pfau, “the killing of the albatross launches the ship of modernity on its journey into what the likewise seafaring young Wordsworth recalls as ‘unknown modes of being’” (983). My analysis is more in agreement with William Empson and John Haffenden’s reading, which came as a response to Robert Penn Warren’s “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading.” There Empson and Haffenden argue that there is no moral causality in the poem since what follows the killing of the albatross are mere “accidents” and not “punishments calculated by God” (159).6 This reading of the Mariner, who embodies disaster, becoming disaster himself, evokes Jacques Khalip and David Collings’s reading of Wordsworth’s pedlar as Dorothy describes him in her notes, as “a persona that incorporates and transmits the horror of what he sees” (par. 1).7 Even though the poem mentions the social reality of the enclosures, Simon Lee does not belong to the propertyless poor that resulted from the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century, since, according to the narrator, the hunter has managed to enclose a “scrap of land” when “he was stronger” but he is physically unable to work on it, which leads to his endless suffering (“Simon Lee” 62, 61).8 While McGann argues that Wordsworth’s poetry in poems like The Ruined Cottage is a displacement of both history and Enlightenment thought, Marilyn Butler asserts in Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries that the poems in the Ballads are “[t]rue to the humanist sympathy of classicism” (59). Despite their “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Butler calls attention to Wordsworth’s emphasis in the 1802 Preface that in order to produce those poems the poet “had also thought long and deeply” (Wordsworth, “Preface” 98). She concludes that the use of “intellect and moral sense” and “rational thought” in the Ballads makes Wordsworth a true son of the Enlightenment (60).9 Khalip critiques this hegemony of historically reparative positivism by pointing out that “[f]or McGann, each poem is the record of a person … that has been left behind as a result of the onslaught of the romantic ideology” (Anonymous 10). He argues that historicism tries to recuperate the “perpetual disavowal and irresistible loss” that allegedly results from the Romantic ideology through “a holistic union” of text with history (12).10 Anne Dufourmantelle uses the term “active passivity” to characterize the life-altering power of gentleness that she associates, among others, with the transformation an embryo undergoes to become a baby (6). Dufourmantelle associates active passivity with growth and development while this article uses the term to signify passivity’s power to force the world to stop from moving, progressing or growing.11 As the 1800 and 1802 editions of the Ballads show us, the poem was not replaced but had its title and vocabulary altered along with its “Argument.” The “Argument” of 1800 changes from one that emphasizes incoherency and lack of causality to one that tries to justify morally the course of events that follow the killing of the albatross. The narrative voice of the unknown editor that composes the “Argument” of the 1800 version of “The Rime” asserts that “the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a Sea-bird” and that “he was followed by many and strange Judgements” (“The Ancient Mariner. A Poet’s Reverie” 260). As J. C. C. Mays points out, the original argument “is replaced by a moral story that tells of crime, punishment, and partial redemption,” one that, I argue, tries to repair the poem’s fragmented meaning as well as to re-pair the poem with the rest of the Ballads (124). At the same time though, the editorial changes in the 1800 version of the poem initiate a reparative form of editing that culminates with the addition of the gloss in the 1817 version of the poem that was included in Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves. While the 1817 gloss makes an attempt to create a narrative spine for the Mariner’s story, it finally portrays even more emphatically than before the poem’s narrative desistance. The gloss’s coherence attempts to address the poem’s fragmentation, making the latter more visible than it was before.12 Active passivity, then, is neither the political practice of what William Keach calls “transvaluation,” the preservation of ruins for the reason that they constitute “objects of positive aesthetic and ideological value,” nor of monumentalization, with its adjacent notions of nostalgia and ideological mystification, which “UNESCO’s cultural heritage projects” point us towards (Stoler 14).13 My understanding of active passivity differs from Washington’s critical elaboration on “passivity without passivity” (18). Even though both concepts draw from similar critical sources, sharing many elements, Washington’s passivity aims to allow non-human actors, those “exterior, anterior, and posterior to us—the world, creatures” a “chance,” by which I think he means the chance to act. Washington tries to depower humans from possessing the sole privilege of action. Active passivity, on the other hand, retains the belief that radical change must proceed from “top-down human doing” (which Washington criticizes) without excluding in its decision-making processes nonhuman beings and things (18).14 Edelman uses this term to criticize versions of the future that, by employing the figure of the Child in a heteronormative manner, i.e. to emphasize succession, lineage and temporal continuity, manage to reproduce the social, cultural and political formations of this current world.